How To Install Selene 2.5.2 On Linux Systems

Edit: Due to the fact that this article is old, the installation instructions may not work anymore. In order to successfully install the latest version of Selene Media Encoder, please access the selene tag and open the latest article (the one on top).

Hello Linux Geeksters. Selene Media Encoder is a video converting tool, with support for the most popular video and audio formats: OGG, OGV, MKV, MP4, WEBM, OPUS, AAC, FLAC, MP3 and WAV. The latest version available is Selene Media Encoder 2.5.2, which has been recently released, coming with changes.

VP9 Encoding Support:

Videos can now be encoded in VP9 format using ffmpeg/avconv. Some points to note:

VP9 encoder is very slow compared to VP8. Use the ‘speed’ slider to adjust the encoding speed. Lower values will give better quality video at expense of encoding speed. Higher values will speed-up encoding at the expense of quality. You need to find a balance that you are comfortable with.

The ‘constant quality’ rate control method seems to be broken in the VP8/VP9 encoder. Both ffmpeg and vpxenc tools ignore the –crf/–cq-level parameter and produce bad quality video. So currently only ‘variable bitrate’ mode is available in the application.

Output format is WebM (*.webm). Other containers currently do not support VP8/VP9 video formats.

Ensure that the version of ffmpeg/avconv on your system was compiled with VP8/VP9 support. As of now, the version available in the Ubuntu repositories for 14.04 and above, have support for VP8/VP9 encoding. You can verify this by running the command: ‘avconv -codecs | grep libvpx’

H.265/HEVC Encoding Support:

Videos can now be encoded in x265 format using x265 encoder. Some points to note:

x265 encoder is very slow compared to x264. Change the ‘preset’ option to ‘fast’ or ‘fastest’ to speed-up the encoding at the expense of compression (output file size).

Only MP4 container is supported for output. MKV output is not yet available since both ‘mkvmerge’ and ‘ffmpeg’ are yet to add support for muxing h265 streams.